With customer conversations multiplying exponentially and new social networks emerging as influential feedback channels, corporations need tactics that let them put their ears to the rail of customer sentiment - in real time. Attensity is applying multi-channel customer analytics that include filtering the firehose that's the social web to uncover emerging trends and issues as seen through the eyes of consumers

· How identifying relevance is the larger problem - and how Attensity has succeeded in annotating and classifying the entire social web for themes, trends, sentiment, and relevance in real time.

· Why the need for these tools has grown into a billion dollar industry over the past 5 years - Forrester forecasts US marketers alone will spend $4.8 billion on social marketing tactics in 2013 and marketers throughout the world will add billions more to that figure - and how Attensity’s NLP technology addresses the emerging challenges that corporations experience in implementing real time customer analytics and engagement.

· What directed Attensity and others in the market to use unstructured data from social and traditional channels to organize and classify tens of thousands of types of conversations into corporate intelligence that answers tough questions like:

How do I address market need?

Who are my potential customers?

Where can they be found?

What competition is out there and how distinct is my product from theirs?

Katherine Matsumoto brings passion for (and a soon-to-be-granted PhD in) linguistics to product strategy at Attensity, where she's a thought leader on the Product Innovation Team that's crafting Attensity’s roadmap, as well as bringing her rich linguistic background to enterprise knowledge engineering and technical presales support. Leveraging Attensity's mission to unlock insight from massive volumes of social media data, Katherine works with clients like Whirlpool, eBay, Yahoo, PayPal and Nike to transform emerging trends and technology into business opportunities that exceed their expectations.

Previously, Ms. Matsumoto worked at the Center for American Indian Languages. She will receive her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Utah this Spring.

As background, Attensity is an enterprise software and services company that helps brands effectively find relevant, deep insights hidden in the vast amounts of customer data in feedback channels so they are aware and can act upon what the customer thinks about their products, services, competition and brand. Using a patented natural language processing engine, Attensity reads and annotates millions of conversations over web, social media and traditional sources like e-mail, surveys, chat and CRM notes.